A cinematographer first and a director second, Dana Gonzales makes television that is dark, side-lit and looks like one thing from the first episode to the last, which is the point. We rate the look; a directing style of his own has yet to show itself.
Fi1m perspective
Watch a corridor in Alien: Earth (2025). Most of the frame is black. What light there is comes from a green screen or an open hatch, and it hits the actors from the side, so half a face is all we get. Four cinematographers are credited on that series and Gonzales is one of them, yet the look holds from episode to episode, and holding a look across many hands is the thing he has spent decades learning to do.
He came up through the camera department in the 1980s and 1990s, as assistant and then operator, and moved on to shooting features, among them Snitch (2013), Criminal (2016) and Greenland (2020). Television is where he made his name, on Pretty Little Liars and Southland and then, from its first season, on Noah Hawley's Fargo (2014). Hawley is the collaborator who matters. Gonzales shot Fargo and later directed and produced it; shot thirteen episodes of Legion (2017) and directed two; and on Alien: Earth directed four of the eight episodes while shooting and producing as well. Outside the Hawley shop he directed two episodes of the fifth season of The Handmaid's Tale (2022) and a feature, Centurion: The Dancing Stallion (2023).
What works is control. He likes anamorphic lenses and long takes, and he uses them for pressure rather than display: the wide frame with a lot of nothing in it, the shot that runs a beat past comfort. On Alien: Earth the new creatures horrified us, and the dark they came out of was his as much as anyone's, laid over Jason Knox-Johnston and Andy Nicholson's heavy, practical sets so that every hatch looked like something you could bang your head on. He has said: "I’m a very visual director, but I put a lot of emphasis also into character, directing actors. I didn’t want to just be a visual director." The cast on that series does take the strangeness seriously, and some of that must be his.
What we cannot yet point to is a Gonzales episode that looks or moves differently from the one before it, or a scene we would hand to the director rather than the cinematographer. On Alien: Earth his episodes sit beside Hawley's and Ugla Hauksdóttir's and match them, which is the job of a producing cinematographer and hard to praise as a directing signature. Our review of The Handmaid's Tale did not single him out, and that is fair: the series belonged to Elisabeth Moss's face and Ane Crabtree's red cloaks long before he arrived. His reputation remains a cinematographer's, and one feature has not changed that.
The test is a series Hawley did not write and Gonzales did not light. When it comes we will look for the side light first, and then for whatever else is there.
Biography
Dana Gonzales is an American cinematographer and director. Born on 18 November 1963 in Los Angeles, he is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers.
He has worked extensively as a cinematographer on feature films including Greenland (2020), Shot Caller (2017) and Snitch (2013), and on television series such as Fargo (2014–2023). Gonzales is a frequent collaborator with showrunner Noah Hawley, serving as director of photography on Fargo and Legion, and directing episodes of both series. He has received a Primetime Emmy Award and multiple nominations for his cinematography.
For the FX series Alien: Earth (2025), Gonzales was cinematographer on the pilot episode and directed four episodes; he also served as an executive producer. His daughter Bella Gonzales worked as a cinematographer on the production.
